Customer Experience Leaders

Col Kennedy is the General Manager of Brand and Customer Experience at Country Road, which is a premium fashion and apparel retailer. Col has a wealth of experience from working at brands like Disney, Target and Cotton On. Topic 1: How to rethink your loyalty program to drive better relationships with customers. Topic 2: What does it take to manage a brand which has thousands of employees and still deliver consistent experiences?

Resources mentioned:

• Start With Why (book), by Simon Sinek.

Key takeaways (starts at 22:55):

1. Start with the customer, not the loyalty program.
2. Invest in internal communications
3. Understand where your brand's positioning is going and remain in-sync with your customer's expectations

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Col Kennedy is the General Manager of Brand and Customer Experience at Country Road, which is a premium fashion and apparel retailer. Col has a wealth of experience from working at brands like Disney, Target and Cotton On. Topic 1: How to rethink your loyalty program to drive better relationships with customers. Topic 2: What does it take to manage a brand which has thousands of employees and still deliver consistent experiences?

Resources mentioned:

Key takeaways (starts at 22:55):

Peter Wagstaff is a Senior Lecturer and Marketing Academic at Monash University. We speak to Peter about customer experience in higher education. We ask the question: Who actually is a university's customer? We debate the reasons why bureaucratic organisations struggle to provide great experiences. And Peter shares a controversial opinion of why it's sometimes actually good to make a student's life difficult.

Resources mentioned:

• The CX field-of-study is being driven by industry bodies like Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, PwC and Harvard Business Review.
• The 4 Ps of goods marketing and the 7 Ps of services marketing
• "What people really desire are not products but satisfying experiences" (source: Abbott, 1955, Quality and Competition).
• Education learning management systems (LMS) such as Moodle, Blackboard, etc.
• Trying Slack as an alternative tool for student interaction
• The Zone of Proximal Development (theory), by Lev Vygotsky.

Key takeaways (starts at 27:52):

1. Know who the customer is—that is the ultimate truth
2. Find ways to exceed expectations
3. The experience your customer has is partly beyond your control
4. "What people really desire are not products but satisfying experiences"

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Lawrence Mitchell is the Chief Customer Officer at SumoSalad. SumoSalad is a quick service restaurant (QSR) with over 160 franchise locations across Australia. And as you'd expect for a brand like this, the in-store experience is paramount. Since we were speaking to one of Australia's only Chief Customer Officers, we asked Lawrence exactly what he does in his role. Not only that, but he also shares a great tip to ensure senior management knows whats going on at the customer level of your organisation.

Resources mentioned:

• Conscious Capitalism (book), by John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia.
• Testing WhatsApp to communicate in a visual way on mobile devices, provided that it's used for "positive sharing".
• The SumoSalad app (iOS | Android) has enabled busy professionals to order and collect much more quickly.
• Start With Why (book), by Simon Sinek.

Key takeaways (starts at 31:51):

1. The side-by-side program and spending time in-store learning from customers
2. Knowing your Why and brand purpose
3. Bringing buyer personas to life
4. Getting the comms right by experimenting with communications channels

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Ray Gillenwater is the Founder of SpeakUp, who are experts in employee engagement. We speak to Ray about how your employees can make a bigger impact on your customers than what you might think. Ray gives away some practical tips on how to use technology to delight customers. But before Ray started his company, he was the Managing Director of BlackBerry Australia and New Zealand. And we go behind the scenes to find out where it all went wrong.

Resources mentioned:

• UserOnboard (website), by Samuel Hulick.
• Research by Gallup shows that only 13% of employees are actively engaged at work. What's worse is that 24% of employees are actively disengaged.
• Employees First, Customers Second (book), by Vineet Nayar.
• SpeakUp: employee-sourced problem solving and idea generation.

Key takeaways (starts at 29:20):

1. Customer experience is very emotional
2. Focus on your employees first and your customers second
3. You have to understand who your customer is
4. UX is such an important part of CX

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

Peter Wagstaff is a Senior Lecturer and Marketing Academic at Monash University. We speak to Peter about customer experience in higher education. We ask the question: Who actually is a university's customer? We debate the reasons why bureaucratic organisations struggle to provide great experiences. And Peter shares a controversial opinion of why it's sometimes actually good to make a student's life difficult.

Resources mentioned:

Key takeaways (starts at 27:52):

Lawrence Mitchell is the Chief Customer Officer at SumoSalad. SumoSalad is a quick service restaurant (QSR) with over 160 franchise locations across Australia. And as you'd expect for a brand like this, the in-store experience is paramount. Since we were speaking to one of Australia's only Chief Customer Officers, we asked Lawrence exactly what he does in his role. Not only that, but he also shares a great tip to ensure senior management knows whats going on at the customer level of your organisation.

Resources mentioned:

Key takeaways (starts at 31:51):

Ray Gillenwater is the Founder of SpeakUp, who are experts in employee engagement. We speak to Ray about how your employees can make a bigger impact on your customers than what you might think. Ray gives away some practical tips on how to use technology to delight customers. But before Ray started his company, he was the Managing Director of BlackBerry Australia and New Zealand. And we go behind the scenes to find out where it all went wrong.

Resources mentioned:

Key takeaways (starts at 29:20):

We reveal the secrets of how great brands delight their customers. We speak to the CX Leaders behind brands like Pandora, Disney, Uber, SumoSalad, Country Road, Microsoft and many more! Delighting customers shouldn't be complicated, so we're on a mission to bring you jargon-free practical takeaways to help you build great customer experiences. Customer Experience Leaders launches in October 2017.

This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.

We reveal the secrets of how great brands delight their customers. We speak to the CX Leaders behind brands like Pandora, Disney, Uber, SumoSalad, Country Road, Microsoft and many more! Delighting customers shouldn't be complicated, so we're on a mission to bring you jargon-free practical takeaways to help you build great customer experiences. Customer Experience Leaders launches in October 2017.